The federal government faces a shortage of cyber security experts. That’s according to an article published in FCW, a technology-focused publication. FCW interviewed federal officials regarding the government’s ability to effectively beef up its cyber security program and found a unsettling trend: the government needs more tech experts. In some cases, according to a Department of Defense official, the government hasn’t even figured out what to hire for:

“We don’t have all the capacity and the right sets of skills that we need to do all that’s required. In the department we are still struggling to fully define and empower the cyber workforce. It’s a big challenge, just to define the techniques.”

In July, a State Department official gave an estimate of the shortage to Reuters: “The numbers I’ve seen look like shortages in the 20,000s to 40,000s for years to come.”

Why is there a shortage? According to Cynthia Dion-Schwarz from the National Science Foundation, it’s a “pipeline” problem. In short, the government can’t find the “people with the right skills sets to just have the entry-level skills needed in order to make progress in cybersecurity,” Schwarz told FCW. Others, like John Arguila, a U.S. Naval Postgraduate School professor and cyber security expert, say it’s time to think outside the box when it comes to recruiting, telling the Guardian that “most of these sorts of guys can’t be vetted in the traditional way. We need a new institutional culture that allows us to reach out to them.”

The shortage is especially relevant now that the president is likely to sign an executive order on cyber security, putting, according to a copy of the report, “the Department of Homeland Security in charge of organizing an information-sharing network that rapidly distributes sanitized summaries of top-secret intelligence reports about known cyberthreats that identify a specific target.”

For months, federal officials and cyber security experts have been warning about this. In April, Janet Napolitano, the head of Homeland Security, said:

“There is a lack of expertise and there are a lot of people clamoring for people who know the internet well…We need analysts. We need people who are engineers. We need people who are experienced in intelligence as it relates to the cyber-universe.”

It’s not just federal officials who have connected the shortage to national security; Enrique Salem, an executive at Symantec, a cyber security organization and software maker, told Reuters in June: “What I would tell you is it’s going to be a bigger issue from a national security perspective than people realize.”

Earlier this month, Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, said cyber security was at a “pre-9/11 moment.”

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown offered criticism of President Obama’s early responses to Hurricane Sandy yesterday, including a dig at the administration’s response to last month’s attack in Libya.

Yesterday, ahead of the storm’s pummeling of the eastern seaboard, Brown gave an interview to the local alternative paper, the Denver Westword, on how he believed the Obama administration was responding to Sandy too quickly and that Obama had spoken to the press about Sandy’s potential effect too early.

Brown turned then to a reliable right-wing attack on the President’s response to the attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi that killed four Americans:

“One thing he’s gonna be asked is, why did he jump on [the hurricane] so quickly and go back to D.C. so quickly when in…Benghazi, he went to Las Vegas?” Brown says. “Why was this so quick?… At some point, somebody’s going to ask that question…. This is like the inverse of Benghazi.”

Conservatives have been hitting Obama for weeks on his attendance at a fundraiser in Nevada following the assault in Benghazi, claiming at alternate times that the President either cared more about politics than lives lost or that he was trying to downplay the attack’s significance. Now the critique has mutated into a belief that Obama is currently “playing President” to score points during disaster relief in the run-up to the election, in contrast to his actions in September.

Brown is not the only one making the insinuation that Obama and his administration are responding too quickly to Sandy only for political reasons. He’s joined in his accusations by such prominent right-wing commentators as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and columnist Charles Krauthammer.

However, Brown’s comments carry a special irony due to the role he played during the Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005. As director of FEMA during the legendarily botched response, Brown, famously dubbed “Brownie” by President Bush, was in the center of criticism from both sides of the aisle that the Bush administration was too slow to respond. An internal review by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector-General following the disaster concluded, “Much of the criticism is warranted.” Brown resigned from his position as director less than two weeks after Katrina hit.